By Hayden King and Shiri Pasternak

While indigenous people keep resisting assimiliation, it’s Canada that needs to catch up.

The response to the Idle No More Movement has generally wavered between the dismissive and the laudatory. In the latter group, thinkers and writers have emerged to say that things are different now, potentially better. We are changing. Among these forecasters are Bob Rae, Bill Gallagher, Ken Coates, Douglas Bland, Lloyd Axworthy and now John Ralston Saul. They are here to warn you/us that there will be no stopping the phoenix-like re-emergence of Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee and, yes, Métis peoples (as well as many others).

Saul is among the most progressive of these non-Native (white) men. He is a political philosopher who is deeply convinced, as he has previously argued, that Canada’s founding myth is indigenous, rooted in the Métis civilization—our collective political culture born of anglophone, francophone and indigenous heritage. He has consistently submitted that the denial of this shared indigenous heritage is at the heart of our national ambiguity, discontent and even dysfunction.

One of the most dangerous First Nations in Canada is a small community of around 250 Algonquins living in rural Québec. The threat they pose is so grave that the Canadian government has repeatedly intervened in their customary governance laws to put minority community factions in power. The Mitchikanibikok Inik, or Algonquins of Barriere Lake (ABL), have not taken up arms, nor do they occupy land near major transport arteries like Highway 401 that could be disrupted to costly economic effect. The danger posed by the ABL lies with a “Trilateral Agreement,” a co-management plan signed in the early 1990s that covers governance over the land, wildlife, and resources on 10,000 square kilometers of their unsurrendered traditional territory.

In Detroit, which is choking on tens of thousands of abandoned properties, the housing abandonment problem is easy to see but effective solutions are hard to imagine. In Toronto, the opposite is true. The abandonment problem, though real, is easy to miss, and effective solutions are available. This article briefly describes Abandonment Issues, a Toronto-based campaign for affordable housing. The campaign was built around a demand that the municipal government introduce a “Use It or Lose It” by-law meant to prevent housing abandonment and reclaim already abandoned buildings through targeted expropriations, for conversion to social housing. One year since its inception, and with the bulk of the groundwork over, we want to reflect critically on the successes and failures of the campaign from the point of view of academics working in the planning field.

Pasternak, S. “A Trial by Biopower: Foucault, Sovereignty, and the Seed,” The Sinues of the Present Genealogies of Biopolitics: Conference Proceedings, University of Montreal, May 2005, published October 2005.